U.S. freeskier Alex Hall threw down a progressive run to capture slopestyle gold Wednesday at the 2022 Winter Olympics, while teammate Nick Goepper repeated his silver from PyeongChang for a third career Games medal.
Alaska-born Hall, 23, capped off his first run with a right double cork 1080 into a 900 — the equivalent of a pretzel in the air — to score a 90.01, which ultimately held for the victory.
Goepper, 27, of Indiana recorded an 86.48 on his second run with tricks including a switch double bio 1260 and a rightside double cork 1440. Goepper took slopestyle bronze in the 2014 Olympics in Sochi.
The American duo’s one-two result matches their finish from last month’s Mammoth Grand Prix, where Hall defeated Goepper by three-quarters of a point on the competition’s final run.
Reigning world and X Games champion Andri Ragettli, 23, of Switzerland fell short on a final-run attempt, missing the podium in fourth. Ragettli, seventh in PyeongChang in 2018, returned to competition in January after a 10-month recovery from an ACL injury to win the Font Romeu World Cup in France.
Sweden’s Jesper Tjader earned bronze at his third Olympics with an 85.35, drastically improving on his 24th- and 23rd-place finishes from the Games in Sochi and PyeongChang. This season, Tjader took eighth at the Stubai World Cup and 11th at Mammoth.
Team USA’s Colby Stevenson, already a silver medalist in big air, finished seventh. Stevenson, the 2021 world runner-up to Ragettli had a solid first run, but had errors on the first two rails and the judges docked his score for a 77.41.
Stevenson, 24, struggled to better the mark on Runs 2 and 3, encountering trouble both times on section two. Stevenson, born in New Hampshire, won last season’s Aspen Grand Prix, the first of several U.S. Olympic qualifying events held in the lead-up to the Games.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
